On July 18 ...

In A.D. 64, the Great Fire of Rome began.

In 1610 the painter Caravaggio (born Michelangelo Merisi) died in what is now Italy’s Tuscany region; he was in his late 30s.

In 1811 British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (“Vanity Fair”) was born in Calcutta.

In 1817 novelist Jane Austen died in Winchester, England; she was 41.

In 1872 Britain introduced the concept of voting by secret ballot.

In 1918 Nelson Mandela, the South African nationalist who ascended to his nation’s presidency after the end of apartheid, was born in Umtata, South Africa.

In 1937 journalist Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky.

In 1940 the Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated President Franklin Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term in office.

In 1944 Hideki Tojo stepped down as Japanese premier and war minister because of setbacks suffered by his country in World War II.

In 1947 President Harry Truman signed the Presidential Succession Act, which placed the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.

In 1969 a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard; passenger Mary Jo Kopechne died.

In 1984 Walter Mondale won the Democratic presidential nomination in San Francisco.

In 1986 the world got its first look at the remains of the Titanic as videotapes of the British luxury liner, which sank in 1912, were released by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In 1988 Texas Treasurer Ann Richards delivered the keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Atlanta, needling Republican nominee-apparent George H.W. Bush as having been “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

In 1989 actress Rebecca Schaeffer, 21, was shot to death at her Los Angeles home by obsessed fan Robert Bardo, who was later sentenced to life in prison.

In 1990 Dr. Karl Menninger, the dominant figure in American psychiatry for six decades, died in Topeka, Kan., four days short of his 97th birthday.

In 1994 a car bomb destroyed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 95 people. Also in 1994 Tutsi rebels declared an end to Rwanda’s 14-week-old civil war.

In 1998 residents along the northern coast of Papua New Guinea were left reeling the day after a 23-foothigh tidal wave hit, killing an estimated 3,000 people.

In 2000, shrugging off a veto threat from President Bill Clinton, the Senate voted 61-38 in favor of eliminating the so-called marriage penalty by cutting taxes for virtually every married couple.

In 2003 the body of British scientist David Kelly, a weapons expert at the center of a storm over British intelligence on Iraq, was found; he had committed suicide.

In 2005 Eric Rudolph was sentenced in Birmingham, Ala., to life in prison for an abortion clinic bombing that killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse.

In 2012 it was announced that the John Hancock Observatory in Chicago was being sold to Montparnasse 56 Group, a Paris-based observation-deck operator.

In 2013 Detroit cited $18 billion in debt and filed for bankruptcy, the largest city in U.S. history to do so.

In 2016 a 17-year-old Afghan asylum-seeker went on an ax-and-knife rampage on a train in southern Germany, wounding five people before he was shot and killed by police. Also in 2016 Republicans opened their national convention in Cleveland as they prepared to nominate Donald Trump for president; Trump’s wife, Melania, delivered a speech in which she assured delegates and voters that her husband had the character and determination to unite a divided nation. (Mrs. Trump’s well-received address was marred by two passages with similarities to a speech first lady Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic convention; a speechwriter accepted responsibility for the passages in question.)